gwax's rumblings

Being hit on by gay guys is, for me, some­thing of a com­bi­na­tion of unwanted flat­tery and a mild nui­sance but I’ve kind of hit my limit for tol­er­at­ing it recently.

San Francisco, as a city, has a fairly large gay pop­u­la­tion and it hap­pens to be the case that where I live (Dore St. and Folsom St.) is right near the cen­ter of gay leather/BDSM cul­ture for San Francisco. There hap­pen to be quite a few leather stores and gay bars within a few blocks of my place and, pretty much every time I take Baldr for a walk, I have to pass at least two gay bars. The sit­u­a­tion is that Baldr is pretty much one of the cutest dogs most peo­ple have ever seen and almost every­one I encounter wants to inter­act with him. I don’t mind gay guys; I don’t mind walk­ing past gay bars; I don’t mind gay guys want­ing to meet Baldr just as I don’t mind les­bians, straight men or straight women want­ing to meet Baldr; but when gay guys try to use Baldr as a way to pick me up, that’s when I start to mind.

Usually attempts are pretty tame, some guy say­ing some­thing about how cute Baldr is and then adding a small com­ment to the effect of, “and he’s got a cute han­dler also.” Sometimes it’s a lit­tle cheesy, as when I took Baldr and Angus out, they, at one point, had my arms spread out going in oppo­site direc­tions and some guy said, “I see you’re hung like this” and held his hands out like the clas­sic Jesus joke punch line. Sometimes, though, body lan­guage and phras­ing can really sketch me out, espe­cially when some­one tries to find a way to touch me, like the tap on the shoul­der when mak­ing a state­ment that’s quite obvi­ously more than just a tap on the shoulder.

All in all, I was doing a fine job of tol­er­at­ing the occa­sional unwanted advance until about last Friday. This past Sunday, the Dore Alley Fair took place pretty much right out­side my apart­ment. The Dore Alley Fair is, essen­tially, a less tourist-friendly ver­sion of the Folsom Street Fair, which is to say that it’s a huge, gay, leather fetish fair. This meant there were a lot more gay guys, than nor­mal this past week­end and I got hit on a lot more. It also meant that, on Sunday, in order to walk Baldr, I had to carry him half a block through a solid mass of men in var­i­ous states of dress rang­ing from clothed to fully naked. The num­ber of com­ments and touches I received was a cou­ple every few feet as opposed to a cou­ple a day and it was just a lit­tle too much for my com­fort. It was an inter­est­ing thing to wit­ness but I’m not ter­ri­bly pleased that I was forced to inter­act with it and I’m rather dis­pleased that so many peo­ple took the con­text and Baldr as an excuse to make advances on me.

The expe­ri­ence does get me think­ing: is this the sort of thing that straight men make women put up with?